for anybody to look at him. I take all the risk on the bike. I don’t make it, you’re no worse off. If I make it, we got two million dollars. I believe we’ll make it.”
Cole bobbed his head. “That’s not a bad plan. It all depends on the truck and the bike, though. I’m looking around this place”—he waved a hand around the interior of the Airstream—“and I’m not impressed with the maintenance. If the bike blows up, everything blows up.”
“The bike’s fine,” Ralph said. “I ride it every day, and I keep it up. But even if you had to get off and run, it’s only a few blocks.”
They talked for a while longer, and Deese said, finally, “We leave here by six, we get down to Vegas by eight. I make the call to Harrelson at nine. It’ll be all over, one way or the other, in fifteen minutes.”
“What about Gloria?” Cox asked.
“We’ll figure her out tomorrow,” Deese said.
“They might want to talk to her, to know that she’s still alive,” Cole said.
“Well, tough shit. That’s what I’ll tell them. I’ll tell them I got her stashed in a house, that I know all about tracking cell phones and so they’re not going to talk to her. And if they don’t pay up, I’ll cut her throat, dump her in the desert.” He hesitated, thinking about it, then said, “And they’ll believe me. Because it’s true.”
* * *
—
WHEN THEY were done talking, Deese went back to the bedroom, and the crying and beating and sex sounds started again, and Ralph said, “I got a hard-on like a telephone pole. Almost like being there.”
“Shut up, old man,” Cox said.
Cole said, “I’m not going to listen to this. Let’s go sit in the Lexus. Maybe we can lay the seats down and sleep there.”
Ralph twitched the shotgun at them. “You can do that, but why don’t you use that key thing to open it up from the doorway here and then leave it with me. You act like you might want to leave us and we can’t have that.”
Cole looked at Cox, then at Ralph and the shotgun, and nodded. “Come with us. We’ll need the key for the seats.”
* * *
—
OUTSIDE, in the Lexus, they got in the back, with the seats reclined, and when they’d made themselves as comfortable as they could for sleeping Ralph said, “Sleep tight,” and went back inside. Cox asked, “What do we do?”
“I think . . . we try for the money,” Cole said. “Deese’s plan will work. If we pull it off, we go up north, somewhere in the Midwest, get jobs, rent an apartment, and lie low.”
“I don’t wanna—”
“I know what you wanna. You want Southern California or Miami, or something like that. But we need to put some time between us and this mess. The more, the better. They got our fingerprints and DNA, and all that, and if they ever pick us up we’re done. We need to be careful little kids until we can work out better IDs and get out of the country. If we get a half million dollars from this deal, we can make it down to Panama and live for ten to fifteen years on it. By then, nobody will care about all this.”
“I don’t believe that. People got shot. People are dead. Gloria’s been raped and she’s a witness. And both of us are part of what she saw.”
“Gloria’s good as dead.”
“No.”
“Oh yes. There’s a logic to this. Like Ralph said: it’s baked in the cake,” Cole said. “Doing what Deese’s done, there can’t be any witnesses. They’ll kill her and haul her out to some old mine, or something, and bury her and nobody’ll ever find her. That’s the way it is. We gotta take care of ourselves. So Gloria’s dead.”
“Still . . .”
“Listen. They’ll catch Deese or kill him, the FBI will. After that, nobody’ll really care about the rest of us. And ten to fifteen years from now, they’ll care even less. I’ve been to Panama. It’s a real decent place. A girl like you, even if you don’t want to be with me . . . There are all kinds of American expats down there, guys looking for women to hang with. You’ll hook up with some guy . . .”
“I’ll hang with you, at least for now,” Cox said.
“Well, that’s fine. I do like you. We got to be careful, though, when Deese and I get back